Ken Campbell is alive and you are dead

On 31 August 2013 it will be five years since the death of writer,
performer, director and general one-off theatre legend Ken Campbell.

In the Guardian's obituary, theatre critic Michael Coveney described Campbell
as 'a perennial reminder of
the rough-house origins of the best of British theatre, from Shakespeare, music
hall and Joan Littlewood to the fringe before it became fashionable, tame and
subsidized.'

The multifarious products of Ken Campbell's profoundly anarchistic theatrical
imagination included his 24-hour long production of Neil Oram's The Warp at the ICA in 1979 - decreed by
no less an authority than the Guinness
Book of Records to be the world's longest play - and his production of
Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy - performed inside a hovercraft - also at the ICA, later that same
year. In the later part of his career he was perhaps best-known for his solo
shows of fantastical monologues detailing all manner of odd experiences and
arcane knowledge.

In 1977, the opening attraction of the National Theatre's new Cottesloe
space was the full-cast stage adaptation by the Science Fiction Theatre of
Liverpool - co-founded by Campbell
with Chris Langham the previous year - of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's
Illuminatus! trilogy. The British Library
made an audio recording of the full 9-hour show and continued, throughout the
1980s and 90s to record Campbell's
(usually solo) shows at the National. These included Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt,
Jamais Vu, Violin Time, The Pidgin
Macbeth and The History of Comedy:
Part One: Ventriloquism.

Campbell was happy to
have his shows recorded for posterity, his only stipulation being that he was not informed of
the date the recording would be happening.

As well as unique live recordings, the Library has tried to acquire any
commercially circulated recordings of Campbell: from the CD 'Wol
Wantok' (King Mob, 1999), in which Campbell advanced the case for Pidgin English as a new world language, to
the DVD edition of G. F. Newman's TV series Law and Order, in which Campbell had a rare straight acting role,
as a crooked lawyer. He later described his performance in Law and Order as an example of 'tie-acting' (the actor tucks in his
chin and mumbles into his tie).

The Library does not have any unique audio documentation of The Warp but it does have a copy of the video version (on
six videotapes) purchased from writer Neil Oram a few years back. This is still
available to purchase from Neil here, now in DVD format.

If you would like to hear (or view) any of the material mentioned in this
blog post you can do so free of charge at the British Library. You will need a
British Library Reader's Card however and you may need to book an appointment.